Presented at the Crossroads Co-production Forum of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival 2018

SYNOPSIS

Almost ten years the Egyptian archaeologist MAYSOON (38) has been living in Berlin.Working as a tourist guide in a museum and having two kids, SAMI (7) and MALIK (7), with the architect TOBI (40), she has arranged herself perfectly with her new live. But when Tobi confesses that he has an affair with his boss JULIA (42) and that he wants to spend his life with her, Maysoon’s world is falling apart. A long-suppressed guilt of abandoning her homeland and her family is now taking its toll. Maysoon blames herself and Tobi for the death of her younger brother, who was murdered in the turmoil during the Arab spring. She has given up everything she once loved for her life with her new family; and now she is losing everything she has...

During the turbulent and glamorous 1920s in Berlin lived Jeanne Mammen, a female painter who loved painting women. Her work is a multi prismatic image of a vibrant liberal and tolerant city and its people ata time where the “modern woman” was taking shape.

In 1919, women in Germany obtained the right to vote, and Jeanne Mammen moved to an atelier on the central avenue of Berlin, the Kurfuerstendamm.

The Weimar Republic was just established. Soon came the golden ‘20s, a period of cultural boom, political conflicts, social changes, endless party, recognition of women and gay rights. This short period between two world wars stopped abruptly with the rise of fascism, but it had already changed the society dramatically.

Unfortunately the position of women in society today is still not taken for granted, and the need to talk about it is still strong. And Jeanne Mammen’s atelier is still there, preserved as she left it when she passed away in 1976, a silent witness amidst a changing world.

May 1868. A chateau hugging a mountainside. Hortense (35) lives there peacefully in the company of her young cousin Madeleine (17). A recluse in her apartments, Hilda (58) watches over her collection of reliquaries with the same vigilant eye as her wards. Each is promised a different destiny: Madeleine, an arranged marriage; Hortense the role of a caring cousin, a life-long but moneyless companion.

The arrival of a young teacher passionate about photography, and then of Madeleine’s future spouse – haunted by the enigmatic presence of Elise,a former lover – turns the order of things on its head. In this nebula, Hortense observes love, its pitfalls and games, before falling prey to it herself.

How can one succumb to passion without betraying it? Love, yes, but at the cost of what sacrfices? Will Madeleine, Hortense and Elise succeed in transforming the destiny they were promised?

ALGERIAN BY ACCIDENT

Few movies are as touching as those which fuse a personal account with an historic happening. That confluence is not always possible, but when it happens, the result tends to be unforgettable.

A young Brazilian woman from Ceara, and a young Algerian man born in the Atlas mountains, meet each other in Boulder, United States in the 60s and fall in love. At the same time, their home countries get into turmoil. Algeria’s independence war explodes in 1962, while Brazil becomes a land taken by a trancelike era.

In the epicenter of that uncommon story, love and revolution live together. Falling in love is like creating a collective movement with only two. Making a revolution is like a love-trance in which everything becomes extraordinary. The relationship between humans changes drastically, substantially. Aspects of life gain numerous possibilities and multiply, mirroring the transformations usually associated with the amorous encounter of two people. We will never be the same again.

How does it feel, to fall in love at the time of a big revolution? How to deal when personal history collides with THE history, the one written with a capital H?

Parting from a personal account, the encounter of his parents, Karim Ainouz dives into one the most relevant themes of contemporaneity: Revolution!

CRASHERS

PREMISEA terminally over-ratonalizing Berlin bartender gets cured from suicide in a fake hostage situaton set up by his ex. Cursed to reboot his unsolicited bonus life, he makes a list to pursue a new goal: peace and quiet and a half decent Joe Everybody existence. But when he falls in love and bromance with a ragtag expat bunch of responsibility avoiders while his Ex keeps seting him up, „peace and quiet“ gets tough to come by.

SYNOPSISAdrian looks back on nine iterations of on & of relationship with his fallen theatre wiz kid ex Marit as well as clinical pointlessness of life in general, when he decides to kill himself. But Marit won‘t let him. Afer traditonal means of cure failed in the past, she stages a fake hostage situaton to score him an epiphany: he‘s but fake suicidal. When push comes to shove, he‘s anything but ready to die. Broke, alone and homeless, Adrian is thrown back into a life he has precious litle use for. Having nowhere else to go, he befriends the cast of his fake hostage situaton. Leary, a Britsh mid fifties riot-boy fallen Business Angel becomes Adrian‘s new best friend and flatmate. Ardi (27), a Spanish-Albanian aspiring It Girl and cunning aimer from the projects becomes Adrian‘s instructor of a less risk-averse lifestyle. Beda (23), an Ivy League US girl of private means, suppresses her parents‘ recent death by alarming party habits and a fake identity and is Adrian‘s impossible love interest. The eccentric troupe are boon and bane to Adrian‘s endeavor of rebooting life from scratch and utter poison for his pursuit of peace and quiet. Yet, he falls in love with the troupe and figures how they are the real cure – if only they were real! When vanished Marit keeps setting him up, Adrian gets a hard time trusting his new family of friends. He stumbles through an urban odyssey in the enchanting and cursed adult playground of Berlin to find his ex and gather the truth about the troupe. Crashers is a loving TV-MA portrait of lost souls in a post Cold War wonderland, a nightlife- obsessed world capital of bohemian burn-out and cheap living. A pocket Europe and, on a good day, a pocket world, craving a final answer to the queston of whether a set-up blow-job is the lesser blow-job.